


this place of wrath and tears

by archivizt



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Injury, The Watcher's Crown, liberal use of commas and metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 05:53:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20077225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archivizt/pseuds/archivizt
Summary: Basira, weighed down by The Eye's gravid gaze and the something-that-had-never-existed, the almost-crown, bears witness to The Watcher's Crown and its consumption of her friend.





	this place of wrath and tears

**Author's Note:**

> _Beyond this place of wrath and tears _  
Looms but the Horror of the shade,  
And yet the menace of the years  
Finds and shall find me unafraid.  
-Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Basira's hands are wrapped around something she cannot see, something that she does not want to touch. Its heavy, cold: it pulses with fear and power and terrible, swirling knowledge.

She is not afraid.

Beneath her, the ground writhes and sings, along with the rest of the wailing Earth. Knowledge, understanding, swells in her bones, floods her lungs, delves beneath her skin like a disease. She walks, and the item in her hands, invisible and impossible, doesn't exist.

Her feet step through the sea's floor, and all the ocean crushes her from above. Her lungs inhale the empty void of space, and exhale nothingness. Her hands sift through past-_present_-future, through a knowing that curdles her blood and blinds her with jagged edges.

She is being watched and she _revels_ in it.

And then, as quickly as summer fades from one's tongue or winter settles in one's chest, Basira's focus narrows, she crosses a threshold and that all-consuming knowledge is sucked from her soul, pouring from her chest like blood from an open wound. In its place, fear rushes to fill the hollows of her bones and the empty spaces between her cells.

Now, she is no longer everywhere and everyone and everything.

Now, she is Basira, and she is scared, and she is in a sprawling room watching her coworker, her friend, be consumed. 

Now, Basira holds nothing in her hands except blood and pain, etched where the **_something-that-had-never-existed_** had shredded her skin.

She can see, with hazy vision, Jon ahead of her, kneeling with his head tipped back, eyes opened to a painful degree, dreadfully blank. Elias is stood behind him, not an ounce of humanity in his too wide smile as Jon gasps for air. There are other figures there too, portraits of suffering that are nearly familiar, despite being unable to see their faces, not truly. 

Hands find her shoulders and close around them, sparking through her skin, and a voice whispers above her, warm and panicked, but Basira cannot hear the words, instead she can only hear the thunder of her own pulse racing in her ears. She feels fragmented, as if the absence of knowledge had plucked her up and dropped her from the balcony and she had shattered like an egg against the concrete below.

Something possesses her, from within those broken pieces, to lift her head and watch, even as arms wrapped around her and hauled her close, burning with warmth, like daggers beneath her skin.

Her vision blurs into a vignette as she does, until the world around her falls away and all that's left is the burning intensity of being watched, being known, and the image of Jon, pain stretched across his face like a mask.

Elias is doing something behind him, something that Basira cannot fathom. Seeing it burns her mind, scalding her eyes and shredding at her psyche just as what nothingness she had once held had shredded her hands.

She wants to stop watching but she can't.

She wants to move, to speak, but she can't.

As she continues to watch, unblinking and achingly still, the weight of being watched lifts from her shoulders and she knows innately it has turned upon Jon. Goosebumps race across her arms at the sudden weightlessness. The pressure in the room, now focused upon Jon as if through a magnifying glass, builds around her head.

Basira watches as he jerks forward, reeling from the Eye's singular gaze upon him. (_His breathing echoes in Basira's ears alongside her shuddering pulse._) He looks terrified when he rights himself, tears smeared across his cheeks and hands shaking as he clasps them behind his back.

(_A voice is chanting in her mind, muffled by detritus. It is urging her to move, to save her friend, or whatever is left of him._)

(_She doesn't._)

The warm grip around her tightens and Elias finishes his unfathomable performance and watching no longer feels quite so close to _dying_.

Shadow drains from her vision and her mind snaps back into baseline clarity. The room, though it had not been spinning previously, feels as though it slows to a stop beneath her. Yards away, Jon is slumped forward in relief, eyes closed and breathing heavy. Elias is still smiling, and Basira's stomach lurches at the grin.

Silent, peaceful seconds whisper by, heavy and wary.

Then, a splintering _crack_ splits the placid air, and Basira can only watch Jon in horror.

Five jagged, white shards rise above his head, driven through his skin and skull and upwards in a facsimile of a crown.

(_And her hands burn where blood clings to them, the phantom shape of the** something-that-had-never-existed **carved into her palms, the **almost-crown** she had brought into the room, aches with familiarity_.)

Jon's mouth is contorted into a scream, but Basira isn't sure whether the noise is coming from him, or her own lungs. Blood rolls down his face, and once the red trails pass his eyes, they nearly look like tear tracks.

Basira almost misses the way knowledge had flooded the fear from her bones mere minutes ago.

Jon no longer looks scared.

**Author's Note:**

> please leave a comment or come talk to me about the magnus archives on tumblr [@archivizt](https://archivizt.tumblr.com/) if you can!!!


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